In 1958, 11-year-old Lidia Matticchio and her family arrived in America as Italian refugees, penniless and speaking no English. Social workers supplied them with lodging, used clothes and boxes of unfamiliar food, including a thick, canned, white substance that baffled her mother. “The red, white and blue label featured a slice of cherry pie and the word ‘Crisco,’ ” she writes. “My mother suspected it was floor wax. . . . Her ‘finger’ taste confirmed it.”

“My American Dream: A Life of Love, Family, and Food” is a beguiling memoir about Lidia Matticchio Bastianich’s path from a bucolic European childhood, abruptly cut short, to her remarkable present-day success as an award-winning television chef, cookbook author and restaurateur.